Posted
by
Unknown Lamer
on Monday August 13, 2012 @07:30PM
from the but-does-it-go-to-plaid? dept.

First time accepted submitter littlesparkvt writes "The NASA and the Pentagon's experimental aircraft could go from NY to London in about an hour. With a cost of 140 million dollars USD. During the test the X51-A will reach speeds of 1700 meters a second and climb to an altitude of 70,000 feet."

Foam at the mouth like this much? Maybe some Xanex or something would help. I wouldn't call the F-22 a piece of shit but it looks like the cost of maintenance will be astronomical. I'd just call it overpriced and underwhelming.

Foam at the mouth like this much? Maybe some Xanex or something would help. I wouldn't call the F-22 a piece of shit but it looks like the cost of maintenance will be astronomical. I'd just call it overpriced and underwhelming.

After the Meteor missile [wikipedia.org] and the AESA radar get into service this could change. The Raptor can launch a long range missile but there are active defenses against radar guided missiles besides passive stealth features. The history of fighters is littered with people who thought short range dogfighting was not going to happen because they had superior missiles and got proven wrong over and over again. The Eurofighter wins in dogfighting because it has helmet sights and IRST (Infrared Search and Track) sensors.

Perhaps it's a POS, but it's a POS that can maintain air superiority even when significantly outnumbered (by an order of magnitude) by ANY other aircraft, full stop.

It's not like there's a huge fleet of these things. There are 187. All the everyday stuff (escorting stray aircraft from restricted airspace, air support, shooting down bombers, air patrols) are handled by the thousands of F-15, F-16, and F/A-18 aircraft which will be in service for quite a while longer.

It holds 8, but it also has 480 rounds in the cannon. Don't knock it - people thought missiles made guns obsolete (witness the F-4, originally designed with no guns), but cannon kills are still a notable minority.

The thing is you never really need to sustain a fight that long. It just takes a half dozen F-22s to go in and shoot the place up; then the 4th gen fighters move in, clean up anything that's left, and hold the territory while the F-22s fly off, reload, and go to capture more airspace. Of course,

The way the Russkis used to do things was, design and build a prototype with all the bells and whistles and kitchen sink. Get it working. Then re-engineer it back to something a goat herder in Kazikstan could use with 5 minutes' training. Case in point? The MiG-23. They could crank them out for a cost of about 3.3 mil per, when the nearest Western equivilent was the Kfir C2 coming in at 4.5 mil and the F16 at 14. They used aircraft grade aluminum and stainless steel where Western aircraft were using titanium. They couldn't engage as many targets, but you could have 90%+ of them available to fly at a moment's notice where maintanance cycles grounded up to 2/3rds of the F16s at a time.

It seems that the USA has become the neonazi military regime. It barely worked in Korea, failed miserably in Vietnam and hasn't even got started yet in Iraq or Afghanistan.

Actually it worked brilliantly in Iraq. The Iraqi army, war-hardened and no slouch, was blitzed in a matter of days. Any regular army would fare badly against the US.The problem the US keeps having is that its opponents aren't regular armies but guerilla fighters. Vietnam, Iraq, Afghanistan are/were all insurgencies, and you can't win those if you're not prepared to kill everyone who opposes you, and even then your tactics will ensure that plenty of formerly neutral civilians will resent this enough that th

It barely worked in Korea, failed miserably in Vietnam and hasn't even got started yet in Iraq or Afghanistan.

Since the Korean war was never officially ended (there's only a cease fire), that's hardly a win. But you are reading your history wrong about Vietnam. In that conflict, we won the battles but lost the war. It was a political defeat, not a military one. As to Iraq and Afghanistan, you're kidding, right? How long did the first Iraqui war last? The second Iraqui war (as well as the Afghan war) would h

Not to mention the difference between a military/government contract and a private one. One has a lot more cost and design controls, the other has a lot more political input for spreading the work around.

Wrong. You need overengineering when you are creating something new and you are not sure if it will work or if your calculations are correct. If yours calculations are incorrect, it is always better to overestimate (heavy, ugly, but works) than to underestimate and have a fireball on the ground.

Ok, I'll probably be modded down to hell for this but... Slaughtering their own people aside, how long was it that the USA and the rest of the Western World wasn't the same? I am enjoying the progressive trend we are on (though I feel feminism has gone a little too far in a few cases - I don't think I should be shouted at for holding a door open for a woman, but that is an extreme case and you will always have those).

In the UK its been barely a quarter century since it was made illegal for a man to "rape"

UNLIKE the f22- raptor, though, this is basically an "unmanned vehicle".
The title implies "jet aircraft" )ie: passenger vehicle) to most people, but in reality, this is not much more than "an oversized, air-launched missile".

We've been at war for 10 years and they haven't seen combat. If they were usable they would have been involved (instead, they were restricted because of the oxygen system issue). Hell, we sent B-2s over Afghanistan. You think they were flown because of their sophisticated anti-aircraft system?

The F-22 is an air superiority fighter. It is designed to quickly establish air superiority against the best fighters currently available. In all of our current conflicts, we have controlled the skies completely from the first several days of each campaign. So there really hasn't been a need for F-22s in those conflicts. The F-22 would be useful in a war against China, Russia, or any other country with a more modern air force capable of challenging the US for air superiority.

We've been at war for 10 years and they haven't seen combat. If they were usable they would have been involved (instead, they were restricted because of the oxygen system issue). Hell, we sent B-2s over Afghanistan. You think they were flown because of their sophisticated anti-aircraft system?

Correct. Turns out that the 'Raptor' problem is, in fact, related to incorrect inflation of the "Combat Edge" chest corset of G-suits. This incorrect inflation also occurred on F-15s and F-16s but no one noticed. Only on the F-22 was it noticed/significant.

Sorry, you're right. It's just that they can't find any pilots that are willing to fly the thing.

It's an awesome piece of machinery, it seriously is, but they need to figure out what's wrong with it rather than just some poorly designed valves in the pressure garment - 4 years to diagnose that? come on...

It's an American missile. Why would they be talking in weird foreign measurements? I mean, "metre"?! R before E? Who spells like that? Sounds like some kind of cheese-eatin' surrender-monkey socialist kind of measurement. Certainly not the kind of measurement that freedom lovin' people from the Good ol' USA would use.

So there you have it. 1700 miles per second. That'll put the fear of God into those godless commies.

(I was going to mark my original post as sarcasm but I thought, "Nah. People will get it.")

Always indicate humor, sarcasm, or irony - this is the new Slashdot. While you are at it, if you are using Morrisetteian Irony instead of the real thing, you must add a link to a scholarly article about lamas, instead of this: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ironic_(song) [wikipedia.org]

For a while, I was starting to think Slashdot was attracting the attention of a lot of Aspergers sufferers, but I finally realized that most of these people don't have the highly functioning part, or even the autism part. They just don't 'get

what really doubts me is actual use of a speedy jet for passenger travel. by the time you get through TSA, someone who were to swim the Atlantic will get there before you do. but then X51A is a hellava missile, awesome weapon system to further bankrupt this country.

Nope. It's correct. They are launching over the Pacific ocean. They expect it to disappear off the left side of the map and reappear on the right side of the map about 14 seconds later. 24,000 miles divided by 14 seconds gives you 1700 miles/sec.

The Pentagon is using them to develop military projects like this. This is what the frigging Military Industrial Complex and DARPA are for. Leave NASA and they're limited and continuously dwindling funds for space research, or we're going to be left in the dust by China, India and the other space faring nations.

Note: If this and projects like it are funded separately and outside of NASAs budget, then, never mind. Carry on...

This is just a small test vehicle. It's to answer the question "How do we make a scramjet that actually works"? There have been scramjet projects since the 1950s, but only in the last 10 years has there been much success. The problems are huge.

There's some hope that this might eventually lead to launch vehicles that are air-breathing up to Mach 15 or so, allowing a bigger payload fraction for the vehicle size. At one time, it was hoped this might bring down launch costs, but probably not.

For supersonic speeds it makes a bit of sense, given that the obvious point of reference for objects moving that fast is the speed of sound. Military fighters often have their speed reported in mach. Most people know the speed of sound in m/s, few know it in km/h.

I agree though, km/h probably makes more sense for a passenger aircraft, but m/s is still a fairly sane unit, IMO.

I can't help noticing that these "New York to London" metrics spouted by the Pentagon are carefully constructed "spin" to frame the X-51 in a "civilian transport" context.

And every time a distance or area is expressed in terms of football fields, the statistic was sponsored by the NFL? Or maybe New York to London is a common metric for describing how fast something flies (especially from when you could compare that flight time to the Concorde).